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Dieter Rams and The Braun Design Team

Between 1955 and 1995, when Rams was working at Braun, the company manufactured or sold over 1,272 products. Rams designed 514 of them. Considering he also made products with Vitsoe, it is clear there are almost no other 20th century designers in the world who can compete with him in terms of the sheer quantity of products he made. Of course, quantity and quality are very different considerations, but this fact is still worthy of notice.

Rams' design work spread from audio systems to lighters, calculators, televisions, and flash units, and his design vocabulary can be detected in many other products. The very influence he had on other designers as the head of the design team at Braun is just as worthy a topic of enquiry as his own design activities. Rams and his design team were as important to the company as it was to them, and without each other it is unlikely that either would have achieved the quality and quantity of work that they did.

Adapted from Less and More: The Design Ehtos of Dieter Rams edited by Keiko Ueki-Polet and Klaus Klemp Gestalten

This form of teamwork depends on human consensus. Dr. Eichler always emphasized this too. It only works, however, if you really understand the other person's work, respect their accomplishment and continually re-evaluate their interests. My close relationships with many of the technicians, which in some cases became friendships, developed at that time. I would like to think that, even today Braun continues to benefit from such personal relationships. Without them you cannot even begin to make acceptable design, and nothing can replace them, no matter how clever your marketing is.

Born in Germany in 1934, Reinhold Weiss became an influential designer at Braun. Weiss studied carpentry and architecture, later attending the Ulm School of Design. He joined Braun in 1959, and his first design for, the HL1 Desk Fan was released in 1961 followed by the compact HLD hair dryer in 1964. He left Braun in 1967 and moved to the United States where he continued freelance work. A recognized figure of functionalist industrial design, his designs are included in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Israel Museum.